Elon Musk called out Mark Zuckerberg to fight in a cage match, and Zuckerberg said he's down for it. Will we get a billionaire on billionaire beatdown? Probably not, but it's fun to talk about. Plus, Amazon faces scrutiny on two different fronts and Reddit chaos continues.
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio. And how the tech are you. It's time for the tech news for Thursday, June twenty second, twenty twenty three. And let's start off with a dumb, juvenile story involving billionaires fronting on each other in an effort to determine which one is the alpha. By the way, just saying that made me feel gross. But let's get to the story. Elon Musk, always the picture of rationality immaturity, tweeted out that he'd be up for a cage fight with Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and then Zuckerberg replied on Instagram because of course these billionaires are going to to their own platforms send me location, indicating that he too was interested in fisticuffs. Musk then posted again on Twitter Vegas Octagon. So why is their beef? Well, it's probably because Meta is in the process of launching a Twitter alternative, currently rumored to be called Threads. The Verge quoted Meta's chief product officer Chris Cox as saying, quote We've been hearing from creators and public figures who are interested in having a platform that is sanely run that they believe that they can trust and rely upon for distribution end quote. And in a podcast with Lex Friedman, Zuckerberg threw some more shade in Elon's direction, saying, quote, I've always thought that Twitter should have a billion people using it end quote, and seeing the popularity of Meta's Facebook platform there, I imagine whether this will actually escalate into some real fight remains to be seen, though. I think we're not likely to get that. I think it's just going to be posturing. But if we do get that fight, well, Zuckerberg has actually been training in martial arts for a while and participating in tournaments and even winning a few, and Elon is Elon. I'm not saying it would be a good fight, but I'd be dishonest if I said I found the concept of billionaires pitted against each other for our entertainment to be you know, bad. I'm all for it beat the rich, as it were. I've got more to say about both Twitter and Meta today, so let's stick with Twitter first. Australia's Online Safety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant says that one third of all complaints about online hate that her office receives relate to Twitter. Now, keep in mind, Twitter is not as big a platform as some others out there, like Facebook and TikTok. It's smaller, so to be the source of one third of all complaints of online harassment that is significant. And then Grant goes on to say that not only is Twitter failing to rein in hate speech and abuse, but the service's decision to reverse several account bans means that there's now a rise of hate groups returning to Twitter, and that gives those groups more momentum, which is not great for society. Twitter has had a hard time holding on to trust and safety leadership. Two trust and safety leaders have left the company in the last year, and at least from an outsider's perspective, the company doesn't seem terribly concerned about trust and safety. They pretty much wiped out those offices, leaving leaders with like no one to lead. The company has twenty eight days to respond to Inman Grant's request here to answer for this problem of online harm on their platform, or else they could face a fine of up to seven hundred thousand dollars Australian. Now that's about four hundred and seventy five thousand, three hundred bucks American. And y'all, let's be serious. In the corporate world, that's not much. I mean, that's a huge amount of money to someone like you or me, probably definitely me, I'm assuming you maybe not, in which case, hey, good job. But it's not a whole lot for big companies like Twitter. And moreover, as we're going to learn in just a moment, Twitter hasn't exactly been current on its bills in general, so the odds of collecting that money aren't certain even if the regulators do decide to find Twitter. This is part of the big problem with regulatory agencies around the world is that they have a limit to their authority. Which makes sense. You don't want them to have limitless authority. That would be chaos. But the problem is that the amount they are able to find companies or to hold them accountable is tiny in comparison with those companies' capacity to just pay it, to go away, or to ignore it. But now let's talk about those unpaid bills. Mark Schrobinger, who formerly was Twitter's senior director of compensation has filed a class action lawsuit accusing the company of withholding payments due to current and former employees. My guess is, when the former director of compensation is saying something's wrong about the company's compensation, we should probably listen. Anyway. According to the lawsuit, Twitter had promised employees that for twenty twenty two they would receive half of their target bonuses, which is better than nothing. Except employees got nothing. They never got the payout that they had been promised. So the lawsuit argues that this constitutes a breach of contract and Twitter should be held accountable to pay the promised amount, plus probably damages on top of that. If I were to guess, this is just the latest in an avalanche of lawsuits leveled against the company. Literally hundreds of lawsuits are forming against Twitter, and that includes lawsuits from the former bosses of Twitter, the people who ran Twitter before Elon Musk took over. They say the company owes more than a million dollars in legal fees to them. Plus there are various vendors and landlords who have accused Twitter of not paying bills. You know, they recently got an eviction notice out of Colorado due to not paying the bill for the office space there. So I'm very curious what Twitter's new CEO is going to do about all this, if she does anything about it at all. Switching over to Meta, the company's independent oversight board as a request, the board wants Meta to evaluate how it approaches prevention with regards to posts that call for political violence. This is in the wake of an incident from last year. There was a video showing a Brazilian military leader telling people they should quote unquote hit the street in an attempt to incite violence during the twenty twenty two Brazilian election. Meda kept the post up, but then the board selected that case as one for it to examine, and then Meta took the post down. So now the board is telling Meta that the company needs to reassure the public that it has the proper policies and processes in place to prevent that kind of stuff in the future, and to actually follow through on those policies, particularly as we head toward another election year here in the United States. Now, I should also add that the oversight board, which can review Meta's choices to remove or to allow posts, doesn't actually have the authority to force change. Can only make recommendations to Meta on courses of action, but the company cannot choose to either heed those recommendations or to ignore them because the board's suggestions are non binding. And you might say, why even have an oversight board if it doesn't have the authority to enforce change, And really the answer is because it's a form of self regulation that if Meta shows that it can self regulate, then that could potentially prevent government regulators from waiting into the whole matter. So you could view the oversight board as Meta's attempt to fix problems before government agencies start getting into things as well. Let's move on to Amazon. So the US Federal Trade Commission, or FTC, has filed a lawsuit against Amazon, alleging that the company uses various tactics to lure or trick people into signing up for Amazon Prime, and then the company does its darndest to prevent people from canceling their service. The FTC says that Amazon used insidious means to get folks to unknowingly sign up for Prime membership without their consent. That's pretty darn underhanded. If true, this would violate the restore Online Shopper's Confidence Act, which yeah, I mean if a company is tricking people into paying one hundred and thirty nine bucks a year and then doing its best to prevent people from backing out of that, then yes, consumers are going to lose confidence in online shopping with that company. Amazon representative Heather Layman denied the allegations and said the FTC is just playing wrong about both the facts and the law. The FTC countered that Amazon purposefully made choices to grab more subscribers and then hold them prisoner because it would impact the company's bottom line to allow them to back out easily. Also, Insider reports that an internal document from Amazon referenced the cancelation process as iliad. That's a reference to the epic poem by Homer about a span of time that happens during the Trojan War, and that doesn't exactly evoke images of a smooth and painless process. Also, why the heck would anyone use a name like that to describe a cancellation process, even internally, it just sounds like it's asking for trouble. You should name it something like beach day or coffee break, y'all. This is kind of like the folks at FTX allegedly naming an internal group chat wire fraud. It's funny until the Feds come a knock in. Anyway, the FTC is seeking civil penalties against Amazon, as well as a permanent injunction that would forbid the company to use those kinds of tactics in the future. And as I mentioned earlier, Amazon denies the charges entirely, so we will see where this goes. Meanwhile, the US Congress is also interested in holding Amazon accountable, this time for conditions at Amazon's distribution centers. The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions said that Amazon warehouse workers filed more serious injury claims than all other US warehouse workers combined. Yikes, that does sound like there's a serious systemic problem that is contributing to injuries and a negative impact on quality of life for Amazon warehouse employees. Senator Bernie Sanders says the problem is worse than it sounds. That Amazon funnels injured employees through an on site medical clinic at warehouses, and the clinical staff are encouraged to get workers back to work as quickly as possible while under reporting serious injuries. If true, this is approaching some of the truly awful work conditions you might hear about in something like a Charles Dickens novel. It explains why we've seen a couple of cases where distribution center employees have voted to unionize. It also helps explain Amazon's incredible turnover rate at these places. Sanders has called on Amazon CEO Andy Jasse to appear and address these allegations, and gave him a deadline of July fifth to do it. He also indicated it was possible that Congress would call upon Jassey or even Amazon's founder Jeff Bezos to testify about warehouse safety and worker injuries in front of all of Congress. So we'll have to see if that happens. Okay, we're gonna take a quick break to thank our sponsors, but we'll be back with more news in just a moment. We're back, and we've got just a couple more stories to cover. The protests over on Reddit continue, though they've taken some odd turns. For those just joining this story, Reddit made a change to its API, its Application program interface, which is how third party developers can create tools that then access Reddit. The change is meant that developers will have to pay a fee as their tools reference Reddit, and the more popular and active apps could rack up considerable fees, perhaps in the millions of dollars per year, and that in turn has prompted several popular apps to close up shop and go dark. More than eight thousand subredits on the site protested reddits policy changes, as well as how Reddit CEO Steve Huffman has handled the situation, primarily by dismissing it and threatening moderators who have participated in the protest with a ban. Reddit generates revenue through advertising, so the protesters have tried to hit Reddit where it hurts the wallet. Some subreddits switched to private mode and essentially eliminated all traffic to the subreddit, which obviously cuts off ad dollars that way, but others went a different route. They went dark for a couple of days, but when they came back, they switched a tag on the subreddit community to turn it into an NSFW or not Safe for work subreddit, and Reddit does allowed those kinds of communities on its platform. However, it does not pair in SFW communities with advertising, and that makes sense because your typical company is probably not eager to have their products associated with pornography or OTHERFW material, and redditors have been flooding these communities with you know in SFW content which assures that no advertising is going to happen in those communities while this is going on. And again, this is a direct strike against Reddit's revenue source, and as such, the platform has removed several moderators, although it did later reinstall some of those in an effort to fight back against this protest, and it's worked for some subredits which have dropped the NSFW tag. There have been cases where some of the subreddit moderators have said they acted without the actual support of the community, and I can understand a moderator changing it back then, because really you need to get the buy in of the community before you make a move like that. But other communities are still going on strong with this protest, and it's not like Reddit has an endless supply of replacement mods to put in the spot where they have banned other moderators. I'm not sure if Reddit is ultimately going to win or lose this battle. I just know the fight isn't over yet. Ford's CEO Jim Farley threw some more shade toward Elon Musk, who must be feeling pretty much in the dark by now. Anyway, this doesn't have anything to do with Twitter. Instead, it focuses on one of Musk's other companies, namely Tesla, and it's long delayed cyber truck. Ford is preparing to launch its own, also delayed electric truck, the F one P fifty Lightning, and when he was asked if he felt that the cyber truck is a significant competitive threat to the Lightning, Farley was quick to dismiss such notions. He said, and I quote, I make trucks for real people who do real work, and that's a different kind of truck. Now I get what he's saying, but it does strike me as wrong to say that folks in Silicon Valley aren't real people. I mean they are, I think. I mean, some of the might be robots, and there's probably one or two who are holograms, but I bet most of them are real people. Anyway. Farley's point is that he feels the cyber truck fails to meet the needs that most truck owners have, like people who actually make practical use of their trucks, and it's not like just a status symbol or something. I think that's what he was getting at, and that conversely, Ford's upcoming truck meets all the needs of your typical truck driving you know, real person. However, all that being said, the Lightning will use testless specs for charging ports, and that could actually become the EV charging standard, at least here in the United States, or at least one of very few standards. Farley said that this was just a decision that was good because it's good for customers. And I agree. No one wants competing charging standards because just imagine you're driving your electric vehicle and you come up to a charging station because your car's juice is getting a little low, and then you see that the charging station isn't compatible with your electric vehicle. That would be a nightmare, right. It's not like when you drive up to a gas station and you're like, oh, these pumps don't work with this car. You want something that is as much of a universal standard as it can be. So I think that it's a wise move. As for the ultimate fate of the cyber truck, I just don't know. I mean, it's been widely reported that the delays have more to do with design issues that have cropped up during development more than anything else, So my advice would be hold off on buying the first ones off the lot and see how things shake out over time. Okay, that's it for the news this week. I'm off next week on vacation, but I managed to record three new episodes in advance, so Monday through Wednesday or new episodes, you'll only be getting a rerun on Thursday, plus the classic episode on Friday. But that's a weekly thing. Fair warning. However, I wrote and recorded next week's episodes while I was under the influence of an over the counter headache medication, which normally wouldn't be an issue except I accidentally took the PM version of that medication, so I got real loopy. I'm gonna publish those episodes anyway, because you only live once, by Golly, so be prepared to learn about symbolic logic and the mighty boosh. I hope you're all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.